In an America in which people have politicized the germ theory of disease and push muddled misunderstandings of how vaccines work, some mornings it's not possible to find a topic to write about that won't result in heaping mounds of behind-the-scenes acrimony.
At this point, we're in the "is the monster dead or playing possum?" stage of the pandemic, and some of the incautious characters are going to get savaged if the thing's merely lying low.
The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has got a sub-variant of its own, and it could be especially ugly. Or not -- but we're only going to know when the music builds to crescendo and a scaly tentacle unexpectedly lashes out at the prom queen, the High School football center and the skinny math geek, all shaking a failing flashlight. Will they survive? I don't know -- I wasn't willing to roll those dice and frankly, I think this movie stinks. We're nevertheless stuck in it until the credits roll, sometime in 2022 unless the unvaccinated manage to breed a really nasty variation on the virus that we can't keep a lid on.
It's raining soup and bowls are free. You can be in the movie or come join the audience. It's your choice. We're all going to have to see it play out either way, but one of them's a lot higher risk than the other.
Though I admit I'd be a lot more sanguine about the denialists being left to their fate if their actions only affected them; as has been pointed out in slightly different contexts, until most of the world is immune, none of us is truly immune.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure I will survive another year-or-close-to-it of trying to teach distanced and avoiding human contact (including "nonessential" going out places). I really don't wanna roll the dice on "will my mental health hold up through another round" but the choice probably isn't entirely up to me.
There's the rub: the ongoing stress of dealing with a pandemic while trying to tamp it down. A linear read of current trends suggests the planet population's going to be stuck with this thing coming back like the flu instead of bottling it up like smallpox or polio. Arms-plus-length? Some kind of social isolation between the vaccinated and the not? Neither one will fly for long, not anywhere but especially not here.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to trying to stamp the virus out, it's not merely or even mainly the vaccine-reluctant or -refusing in the First World that tip the balance but the vast masses in smaller, poor countries, where vaccine distribution is slow and difficult. If J. Random American Suburbanite passes up the vaccine and gets sick, odds are good even if he is very ill, he'll ride the thing out in a hospital with modern medical technology and proper isolation to tide him over. His cousin overseas in Smallistan (or deep in rural Alabama, etc.), on the other hand, is going to have tough it out with aspirin and luck. A bug as flukey as this one can bounce around in backwaters for years, mutating away until it comes up with a winning hand and heads off to the big time.